The annual APS March Meeting welcomes a diverse international community of over 10,000 scholars to celebrate the frontiers of physics. This year it was held in Las Vegas, Nevada from the 5th to the 10th of March. Three members of QCT attended the conference: Alba Torras-Coloma gave a talk about nitridized aluminum thin films for superconducting technologies. David Lopez Nuñez presented the progress in designing and measuring coherent flux qubits for quantum annealing, while Elia Bertoldo talked about methods to reduce the cosmic muon flux in experiments with superconducting qubits.
The QCT group has recently received funding from two national programs to fund its activities in the coming 3 years. The first project NESQQ (Nanofabrication-Enhanced Superconducting Qubit Quality) is funded through the ‘Plan Complementario’ from the EU NextGen funds. The project is part of a larger-scale program on Quantum Communications led by ICFO. NESQQ will aim at improving qubit quality by intensive fabrication efforts, both studying the addition of novel materials as well as by modifications of the qubit device structure.
On 27th of June 2022 the QCT lab presented its newest achivements during the poster session of the SQA conference held in Finland. David Lopez presented a poster titled “Coherent flux qubits for quantum annealing”. A next milestone in a race for efficent quantum annealing hardware.
The Quantum Computing Technologies (QCT) group congratulates with Queralt Portell, who succesfully defended her Bachelor’s thesis on the London penetration depth in thin aluminum layers. Queralt focused on the fabrication of superconducting resonators and the analysis of the samples. We congratulate her and wish her best of luck in the future!
The Quantum Computing Technologies (QCT) group at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE) welcomes a new intern student for the this summer - Juan Jiménez. Juan is currently completing his bachelors degree in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He will be working on signal processing and experimental setups for various quantum measurements.
On Tuesday 21, June 2022 the QCT lab presented its newest achivements during the poster session of the QUANTUMatter 2022 International Conference held in Barcelona.
Luca Cozzolino presented a poster on the measurement and design of flux qubits to be used for quantum annealing. Alba Torras-Coloma presented her work on the ultrastrong coupling regime in superconducting circuits employing superinductors. Finally, Elia Bertoldo prepared a poster on the preparation of an experimental setup to measure superconducting qubits in the underground laboratory of Canfranc.
On Monday 3, May 2022 the TV program “El Cazador de cerebros” broadcasted in La2 of the Spanish National Television. The chapter focused on young students and had the title “Los Cerebros del Futuro”.
The program includes an interview with Carla Caro, a former high school student and participant in the Bojos per la Física program that did a project with the QCT group at IFAE. David López-Núñez also appears in the show.
We would like to offer support to researchers conducting their work in Ukraine that saw their projects disrupted to continue their work in our group in Barcelona. We can offer logistic support, travel, accommodation and all necessary research facilities at our reach. We are an experimental group but we welcome theoretical researchers as well. We are participating in a global effort of labs supporting Ukranian scientists .
If you know any Ukranian researchers at the Masters, PhD and/or postdoctoral level working on quantum physics, quantum computing, superconductivity, please tell them to contact us.
The Quantum Computing Technologies (QCT) group at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE) offers a one month internship in the context of IFAE’s 7th Summer Internship initiative IFAE’s offcial webpage .
The aim of this one-month stay is to become the first step of University students research career. Participants will have the opportunity to discover the real life of a scientist working side by side with QCT researchers. This programme is valuable complement to your physics education.